and the cows, sleeping little, always deep in thought, not speaking at all and in continual ecstasies over the trees of the forest whose mysterious life he watched in silence for days at a time. "I heard the voice of the trees;" he said himself, "the surprises of their movements, their varieties of form and even the strangeness of their attraction to the light suddenly revealed to me the language of forests. This whole leafy world was a world of the dumb, whose signs I guessed and whose passions I discovered."
This same religious emotion seized upon Millet from the moment that he set foot on the soil of this silent forest where there are no streams and no song-birds. He came for a few weeks. He was to remain at Barbizon twenty-seven years—until his death.
***
Here is the moment to sketch a portrait of Millet at home.
Millet was above the middle height and
